More USPTO stupidity and say hello to the TWITs

Well, first of all Microsoft and their little friends the USPTO are at it again. Microsoft has filed a patent on smilies. That's right. If the patent is granted then any chat program that uses smilies (such as Yahoo! Instant Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and any other clients like Apple's iChat) will be in violation of Microsoft's patent. I'm waiting for Microsoft to try and patent the wheel. At that point I'll be convinced that the boys in Redmond have lost their minds.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I would like to invite you to say hello to the TWITs! The TWITs are a group of people from the now-defunct TechTV channel. They've gotten together and are producing a Podcast pretty much every week. The usual people on the Podcast are Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Roger Chang, Kevin Rose, Robert Heron, and John C. Dvorak (yeah THAT John C. Dvorak). The Podcast is all about technology. It's not about Microsoft or Apple or any other company. They just dicuss the latest technology items in the news (like Microsoft's latest patent application), and how they affect us. I like listening to them (although Dvorak has a tendency to get on my nerves!) because they are all very well informed about technology and how it works and they often have some interesting insights into what's really going on behind the stories we read about.